Clarizen Blog

How You Know You’re Spending Too Much Time on Excel

Ever get the feeling that you’re spending way too much of your time working on Excel? There can be a myriad of other facets to your professional life but whenever you think of a day at work it always seems to consist of jumping from one spreadsheet to another. To the point that when people ask what you do you struggle to make it sound more interesting as the simple answer could just be “I’m on Excel all day”.

It’s no surprise as nearly 90% of companies consistently use Excel for their budgeting, planning and forecasting. This is despite the fact that, for large UK businesses at least, 33% of poor decision-making is down to spreadsheet errors. One wonders how they manage to maintain such an addictive presence in our lives. Spreadsheets don’t have to be a bad thing but if you have a sneaking suspicion that their presence in your life isn’t a positive, maybe it’s time to reconsider your relationship with them.

If you think you might be spending too much time on Excel, see how many of these resonate with you:

You take immense personal satisfaction when people call you an “Excel Guru”, though you never want to show it.

You have printed out a poster for your wall with an exhaustive matrix of Excel’s keyboard shortcuts, even though you know them all by now.

The hefty bottom-section of your book case is filled with Excel guides which you’d never throw away as they’re “classics”.

You roll your eyes whenever a colleague calls you over to fix a basic error such as “#####”.

You are starting to buy into the conspiracy theory that maybe time did actually begin on 01.01.1900.

You called your two new kittens Copy and Paste.

You plan every party, roadtrip and romantic holiday on Excel.

You write and regularly laugh at Excel Tweets.

You enjoy when you get to use Excel as a break from “real work”.

You have all of your family’s birthday dates and presents you gave them for the past five years in Excel.

When looking over a colleague’s spreadsheet you can’t stop yourself thinking of all the ways you’d like to change it.

You think creating a Sudoku solver in Excel is far more important than ever actually playing Sudoku.

You dread the thought of your organization moving to a system other than Excel.

You spend your journey home from work thinking of ways you could have Excelled better.

You whip out Excel on your smartphone at a restaurant to calculate bill share and how much to tip.

You often feel that humans are inferior to Excel as they can’t process their emotional data through formulae.

If you think you’re ready to admit you have a spreadsheet problem, then we know exactly where to turn for help. By automating your progress reports, collaboration and project processes with cloud-based project management software you can free yourself from the clutches of Excel forever.